lack of standardization on X11 (was Re: X Gesture Extension protocol - draft proposal v1)

[Vignatti Tiago (Nokia-MS/Helsinki)]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 07:05:25PM +0200, ext Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-08-18 at 14:27 +0300, Vignatti Tiago (Nokia-MS/Helsinki)
> 
> > The whole point to create a consistent protocol is the life time that it will
> > last. Right now I don't see any consistency between X applications that I'm
> > building today with the ones we had in the last decade. I cannot run both in
> > the same X server. I even doubt I can use today's X app in the upcoming 2 or
> > 3 years server.
> 
> A few Fedora releases ago, when we were wrangling about Firefox
> trademark issues, I decided - in the name of lols - to go dig out a copy
> of redbaron (a non-free browser Red Hat shipped for approximately one
> release) and see how well it still worked.  Took a bit of work to build
> a chroot for it with libc5 and the relevant X libs, but having done that
> it worked fine on a Fedora X server.
> 
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/redhat/4.2/i386/RedHat/RPMS/redbaron-3.1-1.i386.rpm
> 
> So, uh.  I'm very sorry if your X server can't run a 14-year-old Xt app,
> but mine doesn't seem to have any problem with it.

that's cool! Honestly.

But I'm not talking about applications built on the top of almost-core X
protocol, like redbaron. No one does this today. Get real and useful
applications like recent compositor managers or a browser and come tell me
about interoperability with old servers :)

             Tiago